by Allen Barra
The larger town of Fairfield provided necessary services—such as schools—to the small nearby communities like Westfield. Fairfield was born in 1910, the same year that nearby Rickwood Field opened, and it was a planned community from the start, the result of U.S. Steel’s purchase of TCI.‡
Years later in his autobiography, Jackie Robinson, criticizing Willie for his lack of involvement in the civil rights movement, would remind Mays of his roots: “I hope Willie hasn’t forgotten his shotgun house in Birmingham slums, wind-whistling through its clapboards, as he sits in his $85,000 mansion in San Francisco’s fashionable Forest Hills, or the concentration camp atmosphere of the Shacktown of his boyhood.”1
The house Willie grew up in was fairly standard for families of black steelworkers, and not terribly unlike those of most white steelworkers in the Birmingham area. In fact, it was not a great deal different from the house of a zinc miner in Commerce, Oklahoma, where Mickey Mantle grew up. Some might have rated the Mays home as superior: an early Mays biography describes the house he grew up in as “middle class.”2 It’s doubtful anyone would have said that to describe the Mantles’ house in Commerce; Cat’s family had little money, but his house had electricity, which the Mantle home did not.
Today some of the neighborhoods in and around Westfield are in ruin. All that’s left of most of the original company houses is their foundations. The population has been shrinking steadily for decades, from perhaps 5,000 when Willie was born to just over 1,100 in 1990 and under 1,000 today. The steel industry that sustained these communities began deserting the Birmingham area in the late 1970s, and the industrial baseball leagues that produced Willie Mays were gone at least two decades before that.
The black population of Alabama yielded many fine baseball players, among them perhaps the game’s greatest pitcher, Satchel Paige; the leading home run hitter of the twentieth century, Henry Aaron; and arguably the greatest all-around player in the game’s history, Willie Mays. The greatest concentration of black baseball talent in the country was in the South, and in the South no state produced as many Negro League players as Alabama; in Alabama the preponderance of talent came from the industrial leagues of the Birmingham area.
Mays grew up in a baseball tradition that was more than half a century old when he was born. Baseball had been introduced to the Deep South after 1865 by Confederate soldiers who had learned the game either from their Union captors in prison camps or during breaks when men from the two armies would get together for some R&R before they resumed slaughtering one another. How the game came to be popular with southern blacks is a subject on which historians are split. Some say that free blacks learned it from their former masters. Others suggest that black soldiers in the Union Army, who numbered perhaps 200,000, picked it up from their white comrades. Yet a third possibility is that blacks watched white men play, then went home and played it themselves. It’s likely that all three factors had a role.
The father of black ball in Alabama was a man named Charles Isam Taylor, who went to Birmingham from South Carolina in 1904. A veteran of the U.S. Army and the Spanish-American War, Taylor worked his way through Clark College in Atlanta, where he helped organize the school’s first baseball team. For four years, Taylor made a living by staging and promoting (and sometimes playing in) baseball games for Birmingham’s black fans. In 1910, realizing that there was more money to be made above the Mason-Dixon Line (where black teams could be matched against white teams), Taylor moved his team to the industrial town of West Baden, Indiana. The fans were heartbroken, and at least one black newspaper, the Birmingham Reporter, continued to print items about their games, passing on information about the local lads who were playing ball so far from home. From there, Taylor fades into obscurity, but his brainchild of using the industrial leagues as a talent farm for a professional league lived on and flourished.
If there was one progressive aspect to the steel and coal barons who dominated Birmingham industry, it was that they saw the value of sponsoring baseball teams among the black as well as the white workforces. Baseball provided great exercise and improved morale enormously, and shirts with company names and logos proved to be cheap but effective advertising.
Lorenzo “Piper” Davis, the most important figure in Birmingham black ball history, was Willie Mays’s mentor and first manager. He told me in 1987, “There is a lot to be said about the way the companies treated us. It was the closest thing a black man could get to a square deal. They paid for bats and gloves and uniforms, and they even paid for our travel expenses to go play other company teams.”3
Davis, of course, was speaking of a time in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the Birmingham steel industry, shaking off the Depression, was booming again, but from the years before World War I until the early 1950s, when a combination of factors ranging from the civil rights struggle to televised major league baseball eroded support for both the Negro Leagues and white minor leagues, Birmingham could lay claim to being the baseball capital of the South.
Allen Harvey Woodward, known to his friends for reasons no one can remember as “Rick,” was one of the big reasons. Rick was the son of steel baron Joseph Hersey Woodward and, despite his father’s indifference, was an enthusiastic supporter of Woodward Iron’s company team. In 1909 he made a daring move—supervising the construction of the first steel-and-concrete ballpark in the South. Rickwood Field, named in a radio contest and combining the owner’s nickname with the first part of his last name, became the home of a team called the Birmingham Barons, named for the coal and steel magnates who ran Birmingham. It would also be home, beginning in the early 1920s, to the Black Barons, who played on alternate Sundays and other days when the white team was traveling.
Rickwood Field opened on August 18, 1910. It was largely modeled after Shibe Park in Philadelphia, home of Connie Mack’s champion A’s—Mack himself came to Birmingham to advise Woodward on construction details—while also incorporating elements of Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field and Cincinnati’s Crosley Field (still known in 1910 as “Palace of the Fans”), ballparks that Willie Mays would still be performing in more than half a century later. Rickwood, which stands today as the oldest ballpark in the country, was for decades the crown jewel of southern baseball. It was as if history wanted to provide Willie Mays with a worthy stage from which to launch his legend.§
Willie Mays would become the favorite ballplayer of New York’s liberal-leaning sportswriters, but there was a conservative streak in him that the writers never acknowledged. He came by it naturally enough. His father was named for William Howard Taft, who was president in 1912, the year Cat was born. Many blacks in Alabama, like blacks throughout the South, supported the racially progressive Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. When the party turned more conservative, they continued to support it if only because most of the local political machines were controlled by white Democrats.
Birmingham after World War II would become one of the hotbeds of black civil rights activism, particularly when black GIs returned from the war. But there were pockets of the black population outside the city who did not easily understand or quickly respond to the call for civil rights. Willie Mays was raised in such neighborhoods, first in Westfield and then later a few miles away in Fairfield. When Willie was born, most black families in Westfield and the surrounding areas didn’t have roots there. They had come there for jobs in the mills and foundries, which had sprung up only in the late 1890s. Black mine and mill workers came to enjoy a certain autonomy and created a life for themselves less dehumanizing than was possible in much of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and even South Alabama, where there weren’t many opportunities for blacks other than picking cotton, lumber sharecropping, and truck farming.
Because of the steel and coal industry, most of the black communities to the south and west of Birmingham were more or less self-sufficient and in most ways independent of the city. They had schools, churches, restaurants, and even movie theaters t
hat were black-owned and -operated (though the movie houses got the films only after they had run in the white theaters). On Saturday afternoons, when there was a nickel to spare, young Willie would see the B-movie Westerns he loved so much and get to fantasize that he too would someday be a cowboy like Hoot Gibson, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or Johnny Mack Brown, who had been a football star at the University of Alabama in the mid-1920s and became a national celebrity when the Crimson Tide won the 1926 Rose Bowl. At the same time, Mickey Mantle sat in all-white theaters in Commerce, Oklahoma, thrilling to the same celluloid cowboys, including Oklahoma’s own Tom Mix.
Willie’s father Cat—or sometimes “Kitty Cat” (or “Kat” with a “K” in early writings on Willie)—was, in the words of Charles Einstein, “a small bouncy, Buddha-tummied figure.”4 His nickname came from his reflexes—his teammates always admired the way he broke immediately in the right direction on fly balls—and the way he sprang out of the batter’s box on bunts. William Howard Mays learned his baseball from his father, Walter, who had been a sharecropper in Tuscaloosa and was a pretty fair country pitcher. “It went from him through me,” said Cat, “and to the third generation, my own son. And they say the third generation is it.”5
During Willie’s formative years, Cat worked in the “spike and bolt” shop of TCI and starred for its company team, just one of several organized teams he played for before and after the war. “I’d play for anybody who’d give you money,” he told Charles Einstein, “because every time somebody came to get me to play baseball, I’d say, ‘I can’t go, man—I got something to do,’ and he’d say, ‘Come on, man, I’ll give you $2.50.’ Sometimes when things was bad, you’d have to go for ten cent [sic] a game. And for that money you learned baseball. You know, I used to study the pitchers when I got on first base ’cause I could bunt my way on, and if I got on first base it was like getting a double. And to me, from second base to third base was much easier than from first to second.”6
Sometime in 1930, Cat, maybe while picking up some spending money on a traveling ball team, met Annie Satterwhite. Annie was sixteen when Willie was born, but she and Cat never married. Her mother had been dead for several years, and sometime before that her father had abandoned the family. Not much is known about Annie, and Willie talked little about her in his adult years. Shortly after his birth, he was given over to the women he would call his aunts, his mother’s younger sisters: Sarah, thirteen, and Ernestine—or “Steen,” as Willie called her—just nine.
Or at least that’s the story Willie told numerous writers. The truth may be a great deal stranger. Willie never addressed the question of why his mother, who settled down near Westfield after she married a man named Frank McMorris, never brought him to live with her. Moreover, the true identities of Ernestine and Sarah have never been established. In the earliest books on Willie, the girls are said to be Annie’s younger sisters, as they are in James Hirsch’s massive 2010 biography: “As a baby, he was given to his mother’s two younger sisters, 13-year-old Sarah and 9-year-old Ernestine, who were his principal caretakers and who called him ‘Junior.’ ” Sarah was “the most important female figure in the boy’s life, a role she played even after Willie left Alabama to play for the Giants.” The makeshift family, writes Hirsch, “expanded to include two more children born out of wedlock, one from Sarah and one from Ernestine. Both women later married, Sarah to Cat’s cousin, Edgar May, who at some point lost the ’s’ on his last name (or perhaps Cat Mays’s family added the ‘s’). Sarah May ended up raising her sister’s son while married to his father’s cousin.”7
In 1988, however, Willie told a different story to journalist Lou Sahadi. In Say Hey, Sarah and Ernestine are not identified as Annie’s sisters, or even as being sisters at all, but simply as “two young girls in the neighborhood” who were orphaned and “moved” into the house by Cat to take care of young Willie.8 How Cat would have gotten the authority to move underage girls into a house—and exactly whose house it was—has never been explained or even addressed. Was this different version due to Willie’s faulty memory or to Sahadi’s misunderstanding? Surely Sahadi had access to Hano’s and Einstein’s texts, in which Willie clearly says that the girls were his aunts. Even more of a mystery is why Hirsch, in his far more comprehensive book, doesn’t mention this discrepancy.
One person in Willie’s life to whom he was definitely not related but whom he called “Uncle” was a man named Otis Brooks. Brooks was not mentioned in Mays literature until Say Hey was published in 1988. Willie remembered, “He was from Mobile, and when we moved to Fairfield, he helped out around the house.… Fortunately, he helped me out all the time. Whenever any of my chores took away from playing baseball or any of the other sports I played, like football or basketball, he’d cover for me. He was the first person who ever said to me, ‘Willie, you’re going to be a ball player.’ ” When Sarah would tell Willie to wash the dishes, “Otis would give me a wink. I knew he’d do them for me. Sarah, meanwhile, hovered over me all the time, making sure that I went to school every day and always finding chores for me—chopping firewood, cleaning up the yard—that Otis ended up doing. If it hadn’t have been for Otis, I wouldn’t have had time to play ball as much as I did.”9 It was the first but far from the last time in his life that Willie Mays would be fortunate enough to find someone to do his chores for him.
One wonders how such a young family got by in the early years of the Depression. There was little money and just two underage girls—one of them just nine years old when they moved in—to do the cooking, cleaning, and child care. How did they pay the bills? When the girls became old enough to work, the combination of their earnings, Cat’s income—he did a little better as the decade went on and a New Deal stimulus package stoked up the steel industry—and the extra money from semipro ball must have improved their situation considerably. In or around 1941, Cat moved them out of the company-owned house in Westfield to a larger home in Fairfield in a neighborhood called “The Heights.” It had always been his father’s dream, Willie said, to own his own house.
Cat wasn’t around much between his job, playing ball, and, after the war, working as a porter for the Pullman Company on the sleeping cars that ran between Detroit and Birmingham—mostly hooked to the legendary Wabash Cannonball.‖ But he never deserted the family; he always sent money back and came home as often as he could.
With Cat so often absent, if Sarah and Ernestine had not been mature and caring well beyond their years, it’s likely that Willie would have drifted into juvenile delinquency and not have graduated from Fairfield Industrial High School. Cat never pushed Willie into baseball—he didn’t have to. Willie loved to play. One of the first stories told about little Willie is the famous tale of his father rolling a ball to the toddler and Willie rolling it back, bursting into tears when his father stopped. In a story cut from the same cloth, Mickey’s mother would say that Mutt dropped baseballs into their son’s crib and tried to get the infant to hold them in his tiny hands; at one time, she said, there were so many baseballs in the crib that the baby “was practically rolling around on ball bearings.”10
Cat and Willie played ball together constantly—at the age of five, one biographer claimed, Willie had regular afternoon catches with his father on the steel mill’s field. By the time Willie was six, Cat once told a writer, “I’d come home from work and catch him across the street on the diamond alone, playing by himself. ”11 If no pals were around, Willie would go to the empty lot, toss the ball up into the air, smack it, tear around the bases, slide home, jog out to pick up the ball, then start the routine again.
When he was around ten, Willie moved up to pickup games, playing sometimes with Cat’s pals from the industrial league and with some of his own friends. His first ball field was a makeshift diamond staked out from the corner of a football field at Sixty-Third Street and Court F in Fairfield, today an empty lot just a couple of baseball throws from a few crumbling buildings that are the remains of Willie’s old high school. Later
, in his early teens, he would pick up pocket change by playing second base on the Gray Sox, a local semi-pro team that featured his dad in center field.
The ball field at Sixty-Third Street and Court F wasn’t much, but it was big league compared to the scruffy patch of ground on which Mickey Mantle first learned baseball. There were numerous other makeshift fields around Commerce, but some of them were too dangerous for kids to play on because of the sinkholes that would suddenly appear when a tunnel caved in. Mickey liked to joke that a person could walk the twenty or so miles from Commerce to Joplin completely underground. Perhaps he wasn’t joking.
Not all the fields were hazardous, but none of them were bargains. One summer, Mickey remembered, “we claimed a spot near an abandoned mine shaft. It made a perfect baseball field, smooth and firm. The foul lines were laid out with a stick and we used old gunnysacks for bases, nailing them to the ground. One bad feature, though, was the outfield. An endless plain of alkali. You couldn’t see a ditch or a fence or anything that would slow the ball. I guess it’s the main reason why I became an infielder. I hated chasing after base hits when they slipped past and rolled halfway to the next town before I could flag them down.” The games on that field lasted until a northern wind blew in and hurled gray clouds of dust at their eyes. “End of game. We’d cough all the way home.”12
“In Commerce,” said Mickey in one of his several memoirs, “when I was five or six, there was a battered tin barn that leaned close to our house”—at 319 South Quincy Street, as anyone in Commerce today will tell you—“and I spent countless hours there, hitting tennis ballsa off the roof or onto the trees of the adjoining lot. Dad would pitch to me right-handed and I’d bat lefty; Grandpa pitched lefty and I’d bat righty. That’s how they taught me to switch-hit. Every once in a while I’d hit one over the house. Often as not, the next pitch would knock me down. Wherever I’d hit ’em, my brothers Roy and Ray would chase them.”13
